His first works were influenced by gothic and Catalan architectural modes but he developed his own distinct sculptural style.
In the first years of his career, Gaudí was strongly influenced by a French architect Eugene Viollet-le-Duc who promoted the return to an evolved form of gothic architecture.

But Gaudí surpassed Viollet-le-Duc, and created buildings and designs that were highly original - irregular, fantastically shaped with intricate art nouveau-like patterns. Some of his masterworks, most notably, La Sagrada Família have an almost hallucinatory power.

He was ridiculed by his contemporaries, at his beginning being supported only by the rich industrialist Eusebi Güell[?]. His fellow citizens referred the Casa Milá as La Pedrera ("the quarry"). George Orwell, who stayed at Barcelona during the Spanish War[?], very much disliked his work.

Politically, he was a fervent Catalan nationalist. In his later years, he left secular work and devoted all his time to Catholic religion and his Sagrada Familia.

He was run down by a tramway and his corpse was thought a tramp's because of his careless attire and the obscurity of his last years.

Though acknowledged as a genius, there is a theory that Gaudí was color blind and that it was only in collaboration with Josep Maria Jujol[?], an architect 27 years his junior whom he acknowledged as a genius in his own right, that he produced his greatest works.